2022 is set to be one of the most challenging years for the industry in decades.

We believe @rightmove will face their most arduous year yet; here are our top 10 reasons why.

Add your own. An accumulation of all that is written below will be behind any, long-overdue exodus. 1. Low stock levels make this platform very expensive.

Discount the notion you’re paying to advertise your SSTCs, it’s the number of AVAILABLE homes that eats up the fee. Some are paying full fees with NO available stock. Some may pay c. £2K per month for a single property!

We’re monitoring the level of supply some parts of Yorkshire are experiencing. This is the critical factor that will decide what type of year the industry is to experience in 2022.

A lot of hope is being expressed about a ‘rush of new instructions’.

Let’s see if it happens. We have chosen six activity centres (credit: @Robert_May_) to follow throughout 2022:

Mirfield (our town - 10,000 homes), Cleckheaton (8,000 homes), Wakefield (47,000 homes), Hebden Bridge (2,500 homes), Filey (4,500 homes) & Barnsley (44,000 homes). A varied selection we feel.

We’re seeing lots of chatter about ‘touting’ boards for unsold properties that could be out of sole agency terms.

With supply being so low, the cannibalisation of existing and under-performing listings might be an attractive proposition.

Is it though? If you plan to approach @we_are_strike boards, are you prepared to sell the property for free?

Do you have a persuasive argument as to why they should pay you when they elected to avoid this in the first place?

Is a vendor with this approach, a good fit for your agency?

Talking of progressive web applications & device agnosticism, the @Google Lighthouse audit process is the gold standard means for measuring the device-friendliness & how much @Google likes it (& will rank it).

Here's some results from just now.

@rummage4_prop killing it.

https://twitter.com/Robert_May_/status/1480828087902289928

The Number 1 portal.

School Report: D-, see me after lessons.

Are property portals necessary in 2022?

The high buyer demand we’re seeing largely obviates the need for a property listing aggregation site.

We’re seeing lots of reports of 20 – 25% of sales taking place off-portals.

Portals fail to present a full picture of the market. With currently 19 or 29 buyers for every property (which ever report you prefer to quote), people waiting for portal alerts or manual checking the feeds themselves are risking a ‘snooze, you lose’ scenario.

Many properties are snaffled up on the first viewing (FOMO in action).

What will happen to estate agency fees in 2022?

We've posted before that it's currently a great time to be a vendor. Agents are desperate for stock so them offering a lower fee to secure the instruction becomes a widespread tactic.

But you want a motivated agent, right? That person who agrees to gardening work for £60, when most others were quoting £100, although happy to have the job, he knows he's under-sold himself. He's not a happy bunny and, yes, he'll complete the work to a satisfactory standard but they're not going to give it their all.

What will happen to house prices in 2022?

A question on everyone's lips right now.

Various predictions from the usual suspects have been released. How accurate can they be, however, when no-one can predict when, or even if, the listings crisis will be over this year? Low supply has been driving up prices for some time.

Once people become priced out (e.g. affordability issues, etc) & buyer demand falls, it's likely there will be a lag phase that will continue to support, but not lift, prices.

We wouldn't expect an immediate adjustment.

You’ve found & secured your dream home, the deal completes and you move in.

What a feeling!

Then you realise you’ve over-looked 2 really important things throughout the whole process; the broadband speed available & mobile phone signal strength.

Sadly, they’re both dire*. We saw the recent OMNIA Report, which demonstrated just how big a factor high speed broadband has now become in people selecting the best property for them to move to.

We wondered if agents and/or the portals were making it easy for house-hunters to obtain this information.

Ten Tips to slump-proof an estate agency

1. Prospecting

Such an important activity that agents should be doing right now. They can no longer wait for the business to come to them, they must go out & grab it. Savvy ones have seen this time coming and are ahead of the curve. 2. Database Building

High Street agents already maintain a list of contacts but extra effort to expand it can bring huge rewards.

Make sure that your own website has a customer-acquiring system embedded; we are starting to market one that has a seriously impressive ROI.

With the culling of property newspaper advertising & print marketing in general too, where now lies the general marketplace for all things property?

The portals? Nope, they're just property directories & entertainment channels.

Radio/TV? Nope, too transitory + very expensive! How about an estate agent's own website?

You've already spent money creating it, why not let it earn its keep & work hard for your business?

Change people's perception & utilise it as your very own digital local newspaper where there can never be any intrusion by competitors.

All the PCs in our office have this site - rummage4.it - as their Home Page.

This is a search engine for Google.

An interrogator of Google. Why would anyone create such a site?

Here's the explanation as displayed on the website.

This one of a suite of tech products devised by @Robert_May_.

So this arrived at the office today.

The Rolls Royce of vacuums, as stated by Forbes Magazine.

Can't wait to put it through its paces.

Review published soon.

@lupe_technology

#excited #whatifitssogoodwedontwanttosenditback @lupe_technology A review in the form of an on-going twitter thread.

The Lupe Pure arrives in a solid box weighing in at 9.3kg.

The inner branded box (photo above) eases out of the outer packaging by using a well-placed sturdy handle.

Below is what you see when you open up the inner box.

We've posted about this before but in this current high-demand, low-supply market, it might be in their best interests for agents to give this concept some thought.

Some may already have it in place, it certainly helps cash-flow when things are tight.

agentresponse.co.uk/how-to-set-up-… The constraints presented by a low-supply market suffocate estate agency.

Reduced revenues lead to smaller profits potentially resulting in a constant battle to stay in the black.

Before the doors even open on a Monday morning there are significant fixed costs to be funded.

We've just seen an email exchange between a current Rightmove customer and the company.

First thoughts, other than why is it so expensive?

Why complicate a simple matter?

Why call the new package Optimiser 2020 when it's now 2021 and many will be moving to it in Jan 2022? The Optimiser package, launched in 2015, is being 'retired' & agents moved to Optimiser 2020.

Optimiser 2015 membership is £1505.75 per month,
Optimiser 2020 membership will be £1900.00 per month.

That's a 26.2% increase!

It's not even the TOP package, you can buy extras!

Estate Agency Websites - A THREAD

We are constantly repeating our belief that an estate agent’s own website is their most under-rated, under-utilised and under-invested in marketing tool.

It’s an agency’s very own Town Square; a place where no competitor can be heard. It acts as many things; An agency’s very own online digital magazine, a unique brand ambassador, a place where they can interact one-to-one with people interested in property.

Such an important part of the agency’s DNA.

So, why then are many sooooo disappointing?

Due to the football consuming everyone's time and energy yesterday, this day also marked 100 days since the delayed launch of Boomin, in to an already crowded property portal market.

One agent posted on here on Friday that they were switching their feed off after no response. Other agents have been posting on here and in Facebook groups about a lack of leads. This appears unfair given that the brand is not yet widely known, however, we live in times of instant gratification.

As a newspaper publisher, we definitely know this feeling all too well.

In a single tweet thread here, we'd like to promote the collection of companies that we have a particularly close association with.

We'll start with ourselves!

Free advertising continues with our digital publications. The March issue artwork deadline is 26th February. @rummage4_prop is an incredible property utility. The clearest & easiest way to Present Property Properly!

It's a very reasonably priced subscription-based property search system (£100 + VAT pm). As a paid-for, it doesn't need to take any commissions from third-party suppliers.

A highly active sales market is fantastic for agents - healthy pipelines created, plenty of completion fees anticipated - BUT this needs to be continually fed by a reciprocal - or preferably higher - number of new instructions.

When the numbers coming on suddenly fall, well.... Combine this with an event that may suddenly reduce your pipeline - the end of the Stamp Duty holiday next month.

Throw in the final end point of the furlough schemes (let's see how many jobs actually remain thereafter) and you have the makings of a perfect storm.

Hyper-local portal: So just a collection of listings from local agents, am I right?

So WRONG! Much, much more than that.

The properties are merely the Gate Keeper’s Lodge to the vast estate beyond!

To use a current buzzword, an ecosystem of everything property but LOCAL! A place where people interested in property can visit whenever they want, wherever they are in the world, using any device & version of software and be wowed.

So many features!

• Properties with rich content and incredible functionality

• Editorial with rich content

If it’s OK that a portal retains all the traffic & sends none to your own website, @rummage4_prop is not for you

If you’re OK with a portal not being able to cope with your rich content and 4K HD photos & videos, Matterport, etc, again, @rummage4_prop is not the site for you If you’re fine with a portal eating your lunch by using the data it gathers from the content you work hard to garner, @rummage4_prop really is not the property site for you

If you’re OK with the above as they upload your listings for free, @rummage4_prop may not be for you